I was contacted by an amazing friend of mine Chidimma Chime, a volunteer at Adesso Development Initiative, to help plan a program for the organisation that will help bring ladies into the tech space in Ebonyi state. I have been involved in different learning programs before now. I have written about some like Teaching coding to teens, while Obum wrote about Dev/des Bootcamp which we organised in 2021 in my university (AE-FUNAI) to bring students into tech.

Tech4girls acceptance image

Working with Tech4girls cohort1 was a peculiar experience because this was the first time I had to work with Females alone.

Abakaliki is a relatively growing/expanding environment, there are not a lot of tech activities happening in the state as compared to other states in the southeast. Hence, more research and thinking were required to design a learning program that would be attractive, fun, and impactful.

In the beginning

Adesso Tech4girls fellows during one of their sessions

Frontend Development and Product Design were chosen to start the first cohort. This was largely influenced by the number of applicants we had and their experience level in tech(most of them were new to tech). Also, the availability of facilitators. The program was on-site, so we needed people who were resident in the state to join the program.

We went straight to designing the curriculum; it was a 6weeks program and we had 20 girls in attendance, 1 week of orientation, 4 weeks of learning and 1 week for project. A modern, flexible and robust curriculum was used, and other supports to help the students learn on their own.

The goal was not just to train the fellows(as we called them) on the technical skills, and this was the reason why we used 1week for orientation. Other activities like business Strategies, research and pitch presentation were taught to the fellows during this time.

Training session

Project Phase

The project phase is the most important time in most technical programs. We needed to get projects that will test the fellows on all they had been taught. For the fellows learning frontend development, frontend mentors came to our rescue, we were able to find projects on the platform that suits what we wanted to test the fellows on.

In product design, we had to come up with project ideas because we needed to test the fellows on a wide range of things.

The Fellows

The fellows were separated into groups of 2 teams for each track, I.e 2 teams for Frontend and 2 teams for Product design. The teams worked together to build their project — remember they only had 1 week to build the project, so we needed them to divide the labour while they also work as a team(trust me they understood the importance of working independently dependent).

Reviews were a part of the daily routine to monitor their progress and make changes when needed. Plus the facilitators and team members were always available to answer all their questions and unblock any blockers they might encounter while building.

Fellows Presentation

The End

The demo day happened on Tuesday the 19th of June, and it was a unique and beautiful day. I won’t bore you with the details, instead, I will just show what the fellows were able to build within 1 week, after learning for 4 weeks.

Product Designers:

Team1: https://medium.com/@eogochukwu2000/matched-dating-app-case-study-366f1fc5bede

Team2: https://medium.com/@ozoemenajoy22/ombre-cinema-cbe278550490

Frontend Developers:

Team1: https://extra-ordinary.netlify.app/

Team2: http://easy-bank-landing-page-team-one.netlify.app

Fellows team Picture

Lessons

A good team makes the job easier. That being said Frank Okoro our Community Manager, Snow and Chukwuemeka our product design facilitators and Ihechikara our frontend facilitator, made me understand that designing the program was not enough — they understood the assignment and they delivered effectively.

No time is too small for anyone who is determined to learn. The fellows were able to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript within the 4weeks of learning. While those in Product Design were able to start making their own research and designs with Figma, and built a case study as their project.

What we did was simply place the feet of the fellows at the door; they still have a long way to go in their learning, and I appreciate Adesso Development Initiative for coming up with this outstanding idea.

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